Hi,

Thanks for the update.

Over the years there has been a flourishing of subject-specific public meetings, which have been good for covering topics in greater depth than is possible when a much larger number of topics are packed into the same one hour time window. However, my guess is that this has contributed to the decline of interest in presenting at the Monthly Activities Meetings.

Bluerasberry and I are planning to resume the Wikimedia Café online meetings. These are more casual and smaller in scale than the Activities Meetings. For those who liked the Activities Meetings for wide-ranging discussions, I encourage you to visit the Café sometime.

From what I have seen, I think that Wikimedia Space may be good for some

use cases, but it's not a substitute for Meta and for many existing public communications channels. One use case for Space that does make sense to me is that people might want to use it for private group communications. However, the platform is under WMF's control, community governance appears to be nearly nonexistent, public interest appears to be low at this time, and I think that Space fragments discussions onto yet another platform. I encourage WMF to be thoughtful about how much money, staff time, and marketing efforts are spent on Space that might be better spent elsewhere, and I discourage WMF from further fragmenting public discussions.

Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )

On Wed, Aug 28, 2019, 11:03 Gregory Varnum gvarnum@wikimedia.org wrote:

Hello,

You are invited to our the Wikimedia monthly activities meeting, taking place tomorrow (August 29) starting at 18:00 UTC (11:00 Pacific Daylight Time). Please note this will be the last Wikimedia monthly activities meeting planned by the Wikimedia Foundation Communications department. After speaking with our colleagues and reviewing engagement metrics from the past few years, we concluded that there are other efforts in place that are better suited to achieve the goals of this meeting.

You can join tomorrow’s final meeting via YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhoJb6rwkfc

And also in IRC: #wikimedia-office

The agenda will include:

• Wikimedia movement strategy update
• Wikipedia’s role in Teenagers lives
• Wikimedia Space

More information on Meta-Wiki: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_monthly_activities_meetings

When this meeting first began, it provided insights into data that was otherwise unavailable or hard to access. Thanks to the amazing efforts of staff and volunteers, those metrics are now available and updated regularly online. The purpose of the meeting thus shifted to focus on sharing progress updates and information from across the movement. We have realized however that this approach limits our ability to connect across languages and provide the level of detail necessary to create impact. In addition, interest in the meeting has remained steady, but is has not grown, and there has been a decrease of interest in presenting.

Fortunately, we have new methods of outreach that allow us to connect with wider audiences.. The new Wikimedia Foundation website, discussed at last month's meeting, has a greater ability to communicate across languages and is already helping us reach more people.[1] We are discussing ways to further expand this support. The new Wikimedia Space project that will be discussed at this month's meeting provides a central, real-time space to have discussions and share information on activities across the movement.[2]

We appreciate all of the feedback people have provided over the years, and will continue to reflect on any additional input you may have. I also want to personally thank the dozens of people that presented over the years and the evolving core team that worked every month to put the meeting on. They often made it look easy, and I know that is not always the case.

Thank you, and I will have more on this topic during tomorrow's meeting.

-greg

[1] https://wikimediafoundation.org/ [2] https://space.wmflabs.org/

--

Gregory Varnum (pronouns - he/his/him)

Communications Strategist

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